Hawthorn and Frankston: a love affair rekindled
Hawthorn and Frankston: a love affair rekindled
The Hawks will make a happy homecoming to Frankston on Friday night when the AFLW team hosts West Coast at SkyBus Stadium.
It might have looked odd when the fixture released, but for as long as Hawthorn’s AFLW team is playing home games in October and until the Kennedy Community Centre at Dingley is open for business, using Frankston’s SkyBus Stadium as a temporary home base with Box Hill unavailable is a fantastic idea.
And also something of a throwback, because Frankston and surrounding areas to the north and south has a long, rich and deep connection to the Hawthorn Football Club.
Some of the club’s all-time greats come from the region.
When the Hawks run out to play West Coast on Friday night, a love affair between Hawthorn and Frankston will be rekindled.
How so?
Here is an extract from a piece I wrote for the AFL Record in 2019.
One of the main motivators for the move from the Junction Oval to Moorabbin in 1965 was to position St Kilda as the club of choice for Melbourne's entire bayside region, from Port Melbourne to Frankston and beyond.
Legendary Saints recruiter lan Drake recognised this and worked the area hard and among those he recruited around that time were Travis Payze and Stuart Trott, who both played for the powerful Frankston Peninsula club.
In 1967, the League was about to introduce recruiting zones into Victoria and Drake was convinced the entire Mornington Peninsula area was to be handed to St Kilda but, just to be sure, he signed Gary Colling from the same club as Payze and Trott the night before the final carve-up of the zones was to be announced.
So imagine his horror and that of the Saints when the League handed the club Ballarat and instead gave Hawthorn all of the Mornington Peninsula as well as parts of Gippsland.
The Hawks went to town, bringing in Leigh and Kelvin Matthews from Chelsea, as well as Kelvin Moore, another player from the Frankston Peninsula club who was close mates with and grew up 200m down the road from Colling.
The suspicion at Moorabbin was that savvy Hawthorn secretary Ron Cook was behind the move to give the Hawks what the Saints felt was rightfully theirs and their mood wasn't helped when Leigh Matthews went on to become a legend of the game and Moore one of the great full-backs of the 1970s.
Indeed, the Hawk premiership teams of the 1970s and 1980s were filled with players from the Mornington Peninsula and beyond.
It is doubtful Hawthorn would have won all those flags between 1971 and 1991 if that region had been awarded to the Saints.
Dermott Brereton, Gary Ayres, Chris Mew and Peter Knights were all Hawthorn champions who might easily have played for St Kilda instead. The Ablett brothers - Geoff, Kevin and Gary - were also from nearby west Gippsland.
According to Colling, coach Allan Jeans used to lament the recruiting zones the Saints were handed.
Ballarat, he would say, "is full of little blokes better suited for the mines" while leafy Sandringham, which was the heart of the club's metropolitan recruiting zone, "was good for breeding Labradors and not footballers".
No doubt, Jeans changed his tune and couldn't believe his good fortune when he later crossed to the Hawks.
Eventually St Kilda got back part of the Mornington Peninsula. It didn't prevent Brereton (who was taught at school by Colling) and Mew from heading to Glenferrie Oval, but it did ensure that Russell Greene and, much later on, Robert Harvey, Stewart Loewe and Nathan Burke ended up at Moorabbin.
This happened just before the draft was introduced in the late 1980s, wiping out recruiting zones altogether.
This time it was the Hawks who were lamenting the make-up of the zones, as they stumbled through the latter part of the 1990s.
How they would have loved Harvey, Loewe and Burke in their midst during what was a rare, bleak few years for the club.
So if you’re looking askance at the AFLW fixture and trying to ponder why the Hawks are Frankston-bound, consider the history and think about it as a happy homecoming instead.
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